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Editorial: Neighborhood projects would be tough calls

Posted: Sunday, September 02, 2007

It might be possible for Athens-Clarke County's mayor and commission to fashion a means for addressing the Neighborhood Advisory Committee's suggestion that taxpayer dollars be allocated to groups of residents for projects of their choosing, but getting there will require careful consideration of a number of questions.

The Neighborhood Advisory Committee, a 10-member group appointed by Mayor Heidi Davison a couple of years ago to monitor the impact of a county initiative to keep individual neighborhoods in the loop with regard to rezoning requests and building projects in their areas, recently issued a report suggesting that the commission allocate a portion of the county's annual budget to projects agreed upon by neighborhood residents in town hall meetings.

Given its conformity to a couple of bedrock governmental ideals - taxpayers' control of at least a measure of the money they send to the government, and localized decisionmaking on exactly how that money is spent - the committee's proposal is worthy of some serious review.

But there are practical concerns to be addressed, chief among them being the fact that the revenue available for such localized projects will be limited. That limited availability raises some fundamental questions of fairness - namely, the questions of how to decide which projects receive requested funding, and when they receive that funding.

Presumably, if such a program is implemented by the county, there will be more than one neighborhood - in fact, there are likely to be several - vying to get their particular project funded. In the necessary sorting out of those requests, commissioners would be called upon to make decisions on a purely arbitrary basis.

By way of example, consider the following hypothetical situation: Suppose one neighborhood, where residents are worried about rising crime, decides it would like to have county-funded streetlights lining its roads. Further suppose that at the same time, residents of another neighborhood, worried about pedestrians' and cyclists' safety after a number of near-accidents on their streets, ask for county-funded sidewalks.

If there weren't sufficient funds available to fund both requests, how would commissioners propose to weigh one against the other?

And how would they defend a decision to fund the streetlights if, in the months after that decision, a cyclist or pedestrian was injured or killed in the neighborhood that had requested the sidewalks? Or conversely, how would they defend a decision to install the sidewalks if, in the months after that decision, violent crime skyrocketed in the neighborhood that had requested the streetlights?

Of course, those sorts of scenarios can also play out under the current funding rubric, in which such improvement projects are planned on a countywide basis far in advance. But the proposed neighborhood-based plan, where there would be no shortage of regular, competing requests for funding, would seem to carry with it an increased likelihood of such outcomes.

Beyond those elemental questions of fairness, there's the question of whether what would be, essentially, a piecemeal approach to addressing at least some of the community's infrastructure needs would be advisable. Again using streetlights and sidewalks as an example, a neighborhood-based approach might find the county, 10 years hence, with a patchwork of unconnected sidewalks and a similar patchwork of lit and unlit streets. A more comprehensive approach, over that same time span, could find the county making clear progress toward cohesive sidewalk and lighting plans.

The Neighborhood Advisory Committee has certainly presented this community with an interesting idea. It's important to recognize, however, that an interesting idea is not the same thing as a workable idea.